Color ultrasound system technology is to extract the biological internal information transmitted via ultrasonic echo which is taken as the carrier of detected information and to image biological tissues and organs, using electronic informatics, computer image processing and other technical means. The color ultrasound system technology can obtain any section images of organs and can observe the activity of locomotive organs, without incurring pain or danger, thus enabling non-invasive examination. Compared with the X-ray imaging technology, the color ultrasound system technology is featured by no radiation, low cost and convenient use; therefore, ultrasonic imaging becomes a prospective modern technology in the field of medical imaging.
Present color ultrasonic instrument has following functions: B (brightness) mode display, C (color) mode display, M (motion) mode display, Doppler mode display and so on. These functions can be implemented by utilizing beam-forming technology, fast Fourier transform technology, Doppler technology, harmonic imaging technology, image processing algorithm and the like.
FIG. 1 shows a structure diagram of a color ultrasound system according to relevant technology. As shown in FIG. 1, a conventional color ultrasound system mainly includes an ultrasonic probe, a front-end circuit, an image processing circuit, and a display circuit or an upper computer display. The ultrasonic probe is a piezoelectric transducer, which converts an electric signal transmitted from the front-end transmitting circuit into an ultrasonic wave and transmits the ultrasonic wave out, and meanwhile receives an ultrasonic echo signal and converts the ultrasonic echo signal into a week electric signal to transmit to the front-end receiving circuit. The front-end circuit includes a front-end transmitting circuit, a front-end receiving circuit, a transmitting/receiving switch circuit and a beam-forming computing circuit, wherein the transmitting circuit transmits a pulse signal to the probe as needed; the receiving circuit receives an ultrasonic echo electric signal from the probe and converts the ultrasonic echo electric signal into a digital signal through an analog-to-digital conversion chip; the transmitting/receiving switch circuit switches the connection between the probe and the transmitting circuit/receiving circuit as needed; the beam-forming computing circuit is connected with the output of the front-end receiving circuit and mainly caches the digital signal transmitted from the front-end receiving circuit and performs delay summation on these signals to realize beam-forming; in addition, the beam-forming computing circuit needs to perform relevant algorithm processing on these data to extract valid data in B mode, C mode, M mode and Doppler mode; the beam-forming computing circuit is connected with the image processing circuit, and the image processing circuit performs certain image processing on the beam-formed data to display delicate images; the display circuit or upper computer displays the processed data on a monitor in the form of image, waveform and the like, so that users can obverse conveniently.
The conventional color ultrasonic instrument shown in FIG. 1 needs large DSP resources or other circuit resources in order to perform beam-forming, Doppler processing, harmonic imaging processing, image processing and the like, thus leading to increase in design difficulty and cost of circuits in the conventional color ultrasound system and causing certain limit to future algorithm upgrade; if the algorithm needs more resources, it is probably needed to redesign the circuit to meet new algorithms. In addition, the PC is used as a display only and the strong computation function of CPU is not utilized, thus resource waste is caused.
At present, no solution has been proposed for the problem of resource waste and high cost caused during technical update in the color ultrasound system based on relevant technology due to complex hardware design and poor flexibility.